See the world with us

Greece: Pounta Diving, Island Driving

As I said in yesterday’s blog we had another early start today to go diving. We made our way down from Naousa to Pounta again to get to Eurodivers. They seemed to be the most well organised dive shop on the island and when we arrived 10 minutes late they were very good at getting our stuff together.

The forgetful NAUI Diver

A feature of the day was both of us forgetting pretty much everything about diving, setting up the equipment, hand signals and everything else in between. This wasn’t helped by the fact that initially we had to admit that we’d also forgotten our certification cards. They almost refused us to dive, but luckily the NAUI site has a handy little tool to find your card number and we were on our way.

Ready on the boat to dive – yes that is toothpaste all over my shirt

Water like a mirror

Even having grown up near water, spending time on boats and being a reasonably proficient swimmer, I am not particularly fond of small boats. Unfortunately this was a small boat, a 10 foot (or so) rib with a solid hull, fortunately, the weather was perfect, the sea was barely moving and the sky was a beautiful clear blue. We made our way to the dive sites, both of which weren’t too far from the dock and prepared our equipment.

Under The Sea

Diving

The diving was nice, though there was not a huge amount of coral or fish. Annoyingly, the GoPro decided to fog up on the first dive, though I managed to fix that for the second dive by holding it in the sun for a short while. The second dive was quite interesting and we went a bit deeper and through a pretty cool archway tunnel.

A stonefish hiding under a rock

A starfish chilling in the sun

Enjoying the underwater experience

Swimming under the sea

Through the archway

Around the island we go

A few days earlier, a very offended sommelier had informed us that Paros “was not that small”, so we decided to confirm that for ourselves by using the afternoon to drive around and through the island. We can confirm, it is small. It doesn’t take an hour to drive around the whole island, but he was correct that it is indeed not that small.

Jenny wanted to practise her driving so I focused on giving her directions, and she did a really good job. But this did mean that we didn’t get many/any pictures of the beautiful scenery but the Greece Travel Guide website has some lovely photos of Lefkes that you can look at.

Parikia

We had somewhat turned up our nose at the main port town of Paros, thinking it to be too loud, too dirty or not classy enough. We were however pleasantly surprised. Walking around in the day, there are a number of winding narrow streets similar to those of Naoussa or on Antiparos. With little shops selling souvenirs, close or ice-cream. We found the ice-cream.

Lovely staircases down winding alleys

Staircases, cafes and bougainvillea are everywhere

There are also many windmills on Paros, with a lovely one looking over the bay and over the town. Within which there is a bar/cafe, for some reason it was closed, which we were a bit disappointed about, but we walked up and around anyway, enjoying one of our last few days on the beautiful island.

Alexandros Cafe Windmill looking across the bay

There is even a “castle” built out of scraps from local ancient Greek ruins. Or as an american tourist said “why did they build the wall from mill stones”

Castle wall built from Ancient Greek pillars

Another lovely meal in Naoussa

The one issue with Margarita’s House (our lovely hotel) is that to do the short walk into town you have to walk up a steep hill and then down the other side. The upside of this is that you can get some lovely photos, and get to walk off the meal at the end of the night.

Naoussa has a beautiful skyline

The meal was a pretty standard fare in a Greek tapas restaurant which we happened across as it’s on the same street as Le Sud and Soso. The food was good, and the price was reasonable, we drank a litre of wine. The atmosphere also was pleasant and the waitress was very nice. Unfortunately, she was a little forgetful, and we had to ask her three times for our water, and she never brought my coke. But she was extremely apologetic about it, and you couldn’t help feel for her running around all evening.

The sign outside with the name

Inexpensive wine in a carafe

Jenny looking beautiful waiting for her food

Naoussa port – most restaurants were here, but they were a bit more tacky and had hundreds of tables

Another day gone, there is only really one more to go before our travel day!

About Rob & Jenny

We are a married couple from London taking a break from the 9-5 to travel the world and soak up new experiences. Follow us to find out more about the places we go, the things we see and the experiences we have.